Most unexpectedly to them, they were confronted by another question quite as direct, from whose point and power they quailed: "The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men?" Whilst many of the scribes and Pharisees and elders had never condescended to show John enough respect even to be present at any time when he was baptizing in the Jordan, still they knew, and felt most keenly, the power of his teachings and work upon the common people; for "all held John to be a prophet;" "but the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him," John. To all human appearance, the influence of the baptism and teachings of John, upon the common people, saved our Lord's life upon this and probably other occasions, for the scribes and chief priests sought opportunity to destroy him; but they feared the _common people_. In this we discover traces of the good accomplished by John's mission, which was "to make ready a people prepared for the Lord;" and this people was the _common people_. Our Lord, however, had a much higher thought and loftier end in the question he put to these men than that of merely saving his life by the facts involved in the question. When a minister, either diplomatic or religious, on foreign soil, is asked for his authority, it is absolutely necessary for him to produce satisfactory credentials of his investment with the office and the honor he may claim. Our Lord's credentials must be clear and satisfactory, beyond those of any other minister, because no others ever have been or can be subjected to such a rigid scrutiny and to such scathing tests as those were which he bore. They must present a more imposing front than that of the power to work miracles. Others had wrought miracles before. Moses had made the bottom of the Red Sea dry ground; and with a single stroke of his rod had cleft a mighty rock to the gushing forth of a flood of water from it. Elijah had raised the widow's dead son, and had kept her cruse of oil and her barrel of meal replenished; so that the famine came not nigh her door. The walls of Jericho had fallen under the sound of Joshua's band of rams'-horn trumpeters; and, in fact, miracles had, in one way or another, been connected with almost all the events recorded in the Jewish Scriptures. On the evidence of these facts the scribes and Pharisees said to him in scorn: "Art thou greater than our fathers, which are dead? and Moses, and the prophets, which are dead?"